Ted Wilson Reviews the World: Okja

★★★★☆

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing Okja.

Okja is the new movie from Bong Joon-ho, director of cult favorites 설국열차 and 괴물. In Okja, a magical hippopotamus named Okja befriends a young girl named Mija in the mountains of Korea. Meanwhile, Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal are planning to eat Okja and feed her to America. Okja has been cloned which means hot dogs for everyone.

The message of this movie seemed to be that we should not eat animals, but some of my most delicious meals have previously been animals. And to be honest, the movie actually made me quite hungry, leaving me with an acute curiosity about what hippopotamuses taste like. Dominoes doesn’t offer hippo as a topping. No one in my area does.

I’m not sure why vegetarians value animal life more than plant life. To me, life is life regardless of whether it has a face. I feel the same amount of remorse for eating a puppy as I do a head of lettuce. Not that I’ve ever eaten a puppy, but I probably would if presented with one that nobody would miss. I’ve also never eaten an entire head of lettuce. Go ahead and try it if you think you can. It’s a lot of lettuce.

Okja is partially subtitled which means you need to either wear your glasses or learn Korean. I did neither, but fortunately for me, the woman next to me was able to translate. I would not recommend bringing a translator because it will make other theatergoers very upset.

That’s another issue with this movie — it’s not in theaters. It was released on Netflix.com so people won’t have to leave their house, but some people have roommates they want to get away from and Netflix didn’t consider this.

The theater I went to was an underground theater in a weird lady’s pool house. She shows movies there every once in awhile. Tickets are cheap and there’s no popcorn and it only seats six people. It’s a poor moviegoing experience but I wanted to see Okja and I couldn’t figure out how to watch it on Netflix.com.

I would recommend this movie because it’s fun to watch a trained hippo do tricks. Ever since Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus went out of business, there aren’t many venues for animal tricks. You’re probably best of training your own pets to do things nature never intended.

BEST FEATURE: Tilda Swinton. Tilda Swinton is always the best feature of any movie she’s in. I like her so much I would marry any woman named Tilda Swinton.
WORST FEATURE: The movie is of average length but I was hoping it would be much longer because I had nothing else to do that day.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Ramadan.

TED WILSON REVIEWS THE WORLD: INVASIVE PASSION